In the wake of a huge scandal which saw thousands denounce Cardiff University for research involving kittens, Graham Henry was granted unique access to the secretive laboratories to witness animal research first-hand.

There are no windows, given its basement location – and you get the feeling that you are entering a bunker rather than a university.

People are flitting in and out of deserted, labyrinthine corridors, decked in long, blue coats and often with their hair covered.

I’m being led into a small lab room – manned by a young female researcher wearing an intimidating mask – by Professor John Pearce, a world-renowned scientist at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology in the field of animal intelligence and Fellow of the Royal Society. He explains what is going on behind a clinical-looking curtain.

“We’re watching rats on the television, we’re trying to understand how the animals are going to navigate,” he says, pointing to a retro television screen.

“We’re trying to understand spatial memory. So we can try to understand how to cure it, if people get Alzheimer’s.”

Before me is a scene that encapsulates aspects of an, at best, historically polarising debate, at worst, one that has inspired protest, law-breaking and even violence.

There are few areas of university research which stoke such controversy, or impassioned feeling, as the use of animals in research.

Images thrown up by it include cage after cage housing deformed animals – some with mice with ears growing out of their backs, chimpanzees with Frankenstinian electrical nodes protruding from their heads – or perhaps kittens’ eyelids sewn shut
in the name of research.

In the case of the latter, reality imitated imagination when Cardiff University attracted global condemnation in July for a piece of research, which finished in 2010, which involved just that.

In the wake of the furore – which saw comedian Ricky Gervais brand the experiment “sickening” and nearly 33,000 people sign a petition to end the use of cats in animal research – the university remained resolute that it had never been cruel, and the research was not unnecessary.

In the wake of that scandal, we sought access to the animal research unit. It was granted – and we became one of the few news organisations to be allowed to explore the unit in Cardiff. We agreed not to identify its location, nor most of the staff within it, for security reasons.

Before me, on the screen in the research area, the researcher is periodically placing a rat into a square pool of water, separated into sections, which masks a platform that it can’t see from the surface.

The rat, after spending days being placed on the platform, then must swim from elsewhere to find the platform, and the researchers watch to see if the rat remembers where the submerged platform is.

The argument is that the animals are developing “mental maps” of the environment, meaning it can remember where the platform is, and swim straight to it.

More importantly, the argument is that this information could provide a breakthrough in developing drugs for improving memory during dementia.

“We even have genetically-modified animals who get Alzheimer’s early,” Prof Pearce says.

“So we take these animals, we give them the drugs, put them back in here and see if their performance improves as a result of the drugs.

“That’s hopefully a way of testing Alzheimer’s. You couldn’t do that with people, because you can’t just pick up a drug off the shelf and give it to a person and say ‘test this’. God knows what would happen. That’s what happened with Thalidomide.”

A reason the rats are still used, he argues, is that there isn’t a sufficiently powerful computer model that can mimic how the brain works – yet.

Prof Pearce then takes a rat out of one of the containers in the lab, pointing out that it has had brain surgery on the hippocampus.

“We know the hippocampus is very important in forming mental maps,” he says, as the rat attempts to climb up the researcher’s shirt.

“So we’re studying these rats. This rat has had surgery, had the region of the brain called the hippocampus damaged, and it has recovered and you can’t even see the scar. The researchers can’t tell the difference, we have marks on the tail.

“And if wasn’t for the marks, we wouldn’t know which animals were normal and which were hippocampal.

“It’s a purely subjective judgement, but I don’t regard that animal as being in any great distress.”

The facility which houses that experiment has grown exponentially from when it was built decades ago – with white-painted corridors snaking underground into several rooms, all capable of housing hundreds of (small) animals.

Standing in a room with hundreds of rats, it becomes clear that, while the animals don’t appear to be in distress, undesirable truths of doing any research remain.

Rodents are housed in drawer-style containers, not dissimilar from the size of an average child’s hamster cage (about 30x40cm, and 20cm high), each containing an animal, or two, or three. Many have bits of shredded paper nests, tubes and sunflower seeds, rather like a pet hamster might have.

Each animal is bought in from a supplier, at about £36 a rat: next page

Each animal is bought in from a supplier, at about £36 a rat, and live their lives out in the containers, with around an hour out a day out to take part in experiments.

Some are involved in behavioural research – examining food intelligence, or memory testing.

Every animal, having been bought in, is monitored by animal welfare officers while it is taking part in the experiment before they reach the ominous “humane end point”.

“We couldn’t release them into the wild, that would be cruel for them. They’ve grown up in captivity. They would be around six, eight, nine or 12 months old when they’ll be put down. There’s no alternative, unfortunately.”

The “humane end point” is an unpalatable destiny for every animal in the building – as is the reality that they will never do anything other than live in the compound.

Some of the rodents (it is mainly mice, rats and pigeons housed there) are genetically modified as part of the research process, and the unit makes an effort to harvest tissues from the animals to examine the biological effects of the experiments.

Animals are sometimes bought in specifically to harvest tissues for research, though they mostly use animals that have reached the end of their research purposes.

Keith Davies, operation director of facilities at the unit, says: “There may be a scientific reason as well, for actually euthanasing the animal, to harvest tissues as well.

“So for example, in this area, there may be a need to actually harvest the brain from the dead animal and then take tissue slices and do histopathology on the brain to see what the effects have been in some way, but it depends on what the research programme is.

“Of course, there are other research programmes going on in Cardiff University looking at other target organs. So it may be a heart, a liver, a kidney, or something else.

“But there will be inevitably have to be an end point for the animal, where it has got to be euthanised to actually harvest the target organ.”

It’s bald facts from scientists who believe wholly in what they’re doing, that much is clear. Whether it is right, is another matter.

The research that caused such a furore, experiments using newborn kittens with their eyes sewn together to recreate the conditions of childhood ‘lazy eye’ syndrome, solidified animal rights protestors’ views on the use of animals at all in the practice.

The chief executive of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), Michelle Thew, said after the Wales on Sunday revealed how the research had gone on, that the kittens had been subjected to “unpleasant procedures” and described it as “unacceptable cruel research”.

But Professor Dylan Jones, pro vice-chancellor of the College of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the university, insists that the research is always “very, very highly considered” and “very, very highly controlled”.

The language seems to make it clear how stung the university has been by the adverse publicity.

Prof Jones, and others, point out that the process of applying for a licence to carry out tests is rigorously controlled by the Home Office, and that the university faces no-notice inspections around once a month to check on conditions at the unit.

“It’s a judgement about which is going to produce the more accurate outcome, and the more informative outcome,” Prof Jones said.

“So I think that’s an absolutely crucial thing to put across.

“It’s not done casually, it’s done by people who are, I think, motivated by improving our understanding, but by improving the lot of human beings and other biological entities.”

It is that issue that strikes at the heart of the recent conflict between the university and animal rights campaigners – whether the moral and scientific imperative to develop medicines for diseases overrides the moral concerns over whether animals should be used (with no consent) to advance them.

But the “kittens’ eyelids” experiment posed a particular problem PR-wise, given the greater affection the public holds for cats.

“Certainly using particular animals poses some particular problems, insofar as people’s individual preferences for those animals, the degree to which they see them as pets in a domestic setting,” Prof Jones said.

“Whereas we’ve got perfectly lovely rats and they’re not the kind you get round your rubbish bins. They are perfectly lovely and cuddly and so on, and are well-kept, and they’re bred specially for the purpose.

“But then people have a more negative view of a rat.”

I ask him whether the university therefore regretted allowing the experiment to happen at all.

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